But he knew the answer to that. He set to work.

Prior to Drake’s arrival, Lukoris had been the home of a thriving colony for hundreds of millions of Earth years. When the great amalgam of panic-stricken humans, computers, composites, and all their trappings fled the path of the Shiva, they did not take everything. Drake was the inheritor of a whole planet and of the former colony’s technology.

That technology was useful in Drake’s own survey of Lukoris. The planetwide data net showed a divided world of extreme horizontals and verticals, of sluggish seas and swamps encircling near-vertical mountain ranges. The mander body could not survive the rarefied air of the highest peaks without equipment, but Drake had to know what was going on there. Who could say where and in what form the Shiva might choose to appear?

He spent the first long winter roaming the planet. In person and vicariously with the help of miniature remote sensing units, he traveled the three-thousand mile ice river in the south, visited the tropics where summer water boiled to steam and only sulfur-loving bacteria could survive, and surveyed the northern badlands where the sphexbats were evolving their first primitive art, drawing stylized animals in blood on sheer rock faces. The sphexbats circled about his equipment. They were cautious and they did not attack at once, but they called to each other constantly in what was clearly a developing language.

Drake stored every image and sound and smell in his body’s augmented memory. He omitted nothing, and he did not hurry. There was plenty of time. If he missed something this winter, there would be a thousand more chances to pick it up.

Finally it was time for the first estivation.

His body started the process automatically, exuding a transparent liquid that hardened into a tough semi-permeable membrane. Small amounts of oxygen and water could be imported, and waste products expelled. As the shell solidified, Drake’s body began to dig. Beyond his conscious control it dived and tunneled its way through a thick green ooze that thickened steadily with depth.

The process was natural to the mander, but not to the consciousness trapped within it. Drake felt that he was

drowning in total darkness, surrounded by viscous fluid that thwarted any effort to save himself.

When it finally became clear that he was not drowning, that the body he inhabited could take prolonged immersion in its stride, he was not much comforted. This was not the way he had imagined his future: trapped in a swamp, in an alien body, the single human intelligence within many light-years with nothing to look forward to but solitude. And he must go through this many thousands of times.

His body was beginning to turn off, powering down for the long night. Drake fought against it, trying to dictate the course of his dreams. He didn’t want to be here. He wanted to fight his way back to the surface, to signal the watching ship to pick him up. He wanted to go home to Earth. He wanted time turned back, to the happy days of youth and love and music.

He wanted Ana…

But that, of course, was why he was here. That was why it was right for him to be here. He was on Lukoris so that he could, someday, be with Ana again.

Someday I will be with Ana again.

As his body cut back the oxygen supply to the brain, Drake clung to that thought. He curled into a ball and went contentedly to sleep.

The pulse of Lukoris’s seasons was slower than Earth’s. With little tilt to the axis of rotation, summer and winter were dictated only by the planet’s movement along its twenty-year eccentric elliptic orbit.

Drake’s modified body had been programmed to sleep through fifty of those long cycles. Awakening at last one early winter, he crawled from the depths and waited for his shell to crack. When it had crumbled enough to give him freedom of movement, he tried to begin his inspection. His mander body would not let him do it. It insisted that he eat and drink, ravenously, breaking an eight-hundred-year fast. Only after that was he allowed to turn his attention to Lukoris.

At once he thought that he saw changes. The instruments assured him that it was illusion. The variations he seemed to observe were purely psychological. He was adapting to the mander body, and as he did so Lukoris’s bottle-green swamps and flame-colored precipices became beautiful to him.

It confirmed the wisdom of coming here long before any Shiva influence might be expected. The adaptation was a transient effect, something that would settle down after the first few estivations.

He continued his careful monitoring and recording of plant and animal populations, diurnal temperature variations, surface and subsurface geology, solar radiation levels, and ten thousand other variables. All measurements went up to the orbiting ship. From there they were transmitted by S-wave data link to headquarters, half a galaxy away.

What was important? Drake did not know. Maybe everything, maybe nothing.

There was one unplanned and unpleasant incident, when he became too interested in a threadlike plant that wove great mats on the swampy surface and lured big animals there. When the threads broke, apparently by intention and all at once, the animal sank into the ooze to die and provided nutrients. Drake was not heavy enough to be at risk; but he was far from any cover when the sphexbat came sweeping on its first run of the day.

It saw him and changed course. A cloud of white vapor came drifting toward him as it passed overhead. The only possible escape route was downward. Drake plunged headfirst into the ooze with his mouths and eyes tightly closed, wondering if this was merely a different way of dying. It was still midwinter, much too early in the year for the mander to estivate.

The slime of the swamp was cool on his skin. After a few minutes Drake realized that he was not suffocating. His body could absorb enough oxygen through its epidermis to keep him alive, provided that he did not move much.

He waited for seven hours, almost half a Lukoris day. The neurotoxin cloud must be given enough time to be absorbed into the swamp, or to dissociate chemically in the presence of sunlight.

When he wriggled back to the surface through the sucking ooze, the sphexbat was right in the middle of its collection run and only a couple of kilometers away. It swooped noiselessly toward Drake on twenty-meter pinions, the capture scoop already open for pickup. It was within thirty meters when it saw that Drake was upright and moving, rather than lying immobile on the mat of the swamp. Twin maws hooted a two-tone call of surprise and rage. The sphexbat banked and veered away.

Ten seconds later, at a higher altitude, it returned to pass immediately overhead. A pair of black eyes ahead of the scoop stared right down at Drake.

What would it tell its fellows on its return to the high cliffs? That some variant mander had arisen, with a new technique for self-defense?

Maybe, in Lukoris’s far future, oral history around a sphexbat tribal fire would tell of a time when a strange creature had appeared on the surface, invulnerable to the paralyzing neurotoxin on which all hunting depended.

Drake told himself that he was fantasizing. Lukoris did not have a far future that was continuous with the past and the present. The arrival of the Shiva would be a singular point on the time line, a moment when future and past were discontinuously connected.

He returned to his careful survey of Lukoris in all its aspects.

On and on.

Winters continued, one after another after another, until Drake no longer saw them in his mind as unique events but as a long continuum of insignificant change. If summers seemed more memorable, it was only because he remained awake more rarely. They formed unpleasant data points, when most of Lukoris experienced conditions of heat and dryness that the mander body could scarcely tolerate. Drake felt that he had to supplement the recording instruments on the surface and in orbit by ground surveys in summer as well as winter, but it was not easy. The changes made to the mander body could keep it awake, but at some level it knew a deeper truth. As temperatures rose, every cell of his body longed to be ten meters belowground, at rest in the cool and quiet dark.